Get Many Leads with Manychat - Ashley Mikkelsen

http://srtaspanish.com/

http://teachtheteacherauthor.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teach.the.teacherauthor

00:00 Hi, we're going to talk about growing your email list on Instagram with automations, but also a few other strategies too, just to sneak in there in case we haven't met before hey, my name is Ashley Mickelson i am a Spanish teacher who kind of fell into business owning by accident. I started blogging and then I became a TPT author and now I'm out of the classroom for a little bit. I got, I call it on pause. I work from home and I have 3 littles. This whole teacher preneur journey has been a lot of trial and error. So I do like to present at conferences like this just so I can hopefully share some of that trial and help you skip the error with this journey of your own. 

00:43 So just quickly, so you know where we're going on this presentation, I never want to waste your time. We're going to very, very briefly talk about starting your list that's not the focus of this presentation. We're going to talk about different ways you can take photos and videos of your freebies, because if we are talking about growing your your list, those visuals are super important. We're going to talk about consistently sharing your opt in on social, specifically Instagram, and we're going to talk about a few different areas in which you can do that. 

01:11 And then the focus of this presentation is going to be talking about automating that link sharing by using many chat, which is the service that says, you know, if you've ever seen the comment X and I'll send you Y, that's many chat. And then we'll talk about how you can, you know, repeat, reduce, reuse, recycle this process for your own list to grow. So that's where we're going if that sounds good to you, stick with me and let's go on. 

01:37 So I just wanted to give you kind of a glimpse of what could happen if you're using Instagram effectively to grow your list. This is a screenshot from my own email service provider from last year. And I think you can probably guess at which point I had a visual that really caught the eye of my audience and they said, yes, I do want that free resource thank you. So really quickly, like I said, this is not the focus of this presentation, but if you haven't, you do need to start your email list you just, you just need to do it and again, that could be a whole other presentation talking about why you need your list. 

02:12 But here's the basics. Choose your email service provider or ESP pick your freebie or create it. If you are a teacher author and you're on TBT, you know that you already had to have a freebie in order to be able to open your store at all. So hopefully that was a great freebie and you could just repackage that as your email opt in. Then you're going to connect the dots. So your email service provider and your freebie are going to be connected through a form and that's the form where people are going to put their name and their email or just their email and they're going to say, yes, I want this. 

02:47 And that submission is going to tell the email service, provider hey, they signed up for this thing and it's going to automatically deliver the freebie. If you need help with that process at all, I have a 27 minute course that walks you step by step by step. It's great through doing this so just you know, touch base with me later, I'm happy to send you that that but like I said, this is not the focus so once you have your email list set up you have your email opt in, you need to have at least one opt in you're using for this. 

03:17 We're going to take a ton of photos and videos and you can do Square, right, because some feeds are still happy with Square. You definitely want to do the portrait, which is that newer kind of taller format. You want to do story images and tons and tons and tons of B roll footage, which is that video footage that's captured in the tall format, the 1080 by 1920 format. And that's really going to be the bulk of what we're talking about, purposing and repurposing. But just as you know you have everything else set up, make sure you're capturing things and editing them into these four different formats. 

03:55 Maybe you're going, you're saying we want tons and tons and tons of videos and photos. What on earth could that even look like? Here's just a few examples. It could be like if you have any sort of handout, if you have any sort of workbook, if you have any sort of like journal, if you have any, any sort of anything that people would be writing on, you would take video of printing the resource of like prepping it if they need to like staple it together or they're just gonna lay it out on a table to work on. 

04:22 If it's a poster or some sort of something like that, hang it. You can show an overview of the pages just by like panning over the pages laid out flat on a desk, maybe in a cozy like coffee shop kind of setting. Again, you know your audience and you know your people best so obviously the staging and how you're making the the freebie look is going to be different, but the video shots can be kind of the same as these formats. 

04:48 If you have multiple pages, you can show like flipping through the pages so they can see kind of a peek of what's included. Show yourself writing on it you can do the bird's eye view where you're writing on the paper. You can even do those kind of cool shots where you've connected your phone to the pen or pencil writing utensil and it shows this kind of like upright looking right at the cameras it's writing on the page. That's super. We're visually engaging coloring on it if it's a journal type resource or workbook, break out the highlighters, break out, you know, whatever fancy markers you like to use. 

05:22 And of course you could show the finished product as if a customer had used it so again, I just keep coming back to journal but whatever your opt in is, like if it's a checklist to doing things, if it's a think about this sort of brainstorming sheet, whatever it is, you could also show the finished thing as if a customer had sat down and used your opt in resource to of course, great effect. And then of course, videos and photos just of you. You don't actually need to have the opt in in the video in order to be able to share it and I'll show you some examples here, but you should have some B roll footage of yourself if you wanted to see a few examples again, this is just one of them this is kind of like a craft thing that I have that's a freebie opt in for my list. 

06:12 And you can see that I have photos of myself doing the craft you have photos of it done, you have kind of the steps and step processes. I took videos of every single step of the way, including it coming out of the printer, all that sort of stuff. I just wanted to show you a couple of them. And you can see like I clearly edited that slide where it was speed up and moving really quickly. But I can use bits and pieces of that video footage in a whole bunch of different ways. 

06:37 So hopefully this just kind of gives you an idea of how you could capture different parts of your opt in being used. And the reason why you want so many different photos and videos is because you never know what's going to catch people's eye. Like people might be really drawn to this image where it says glue and it's kind of the accordion fold, or they might be drawn to the thing in progress. You just don't know what's going to convert for your audience. Next up, when we're talking about how to grow your list, of course, you need to consistently share and we're going to talk about all of the surfaces of Instagram when we're talking about feeds, stories, DMS, reels, lives, no one ever sees everything. 

07:15 Ok? My husband is my biggest cheerleader i love him so much and he is so sweet. He has post notifications turned on for me he has like every sort of thing it turned on in the social media world where if I post anything, his phone buzzes, his watch buzzes, things Ding, like all sorts of stuff and he still doesn't see everything. Like, you know, he is trying to be able to see everything just so that he can engage in. Like I said, he's the sweetest, but that's just an example to say like even your biggest fans will not see everything so you might feel like, Oh my gosh, I just shared this here, here, here, here, here. 

07:52 People are going to get so sick of me talking about this. I guarantee you they won't. They won't they won't get sick of you talking about it because they're only going to see a very small percentage of what you are pushing out. So by posting to multiple places you are widening your chance of getting seen. Ok, this is just an example again, reach is going to vary with each post you want to hit the top of your frontal, the mid funnel, and your current customers. 

08:17 So this is just a couple examples of different types of content that I created and how it reached different groups of people, right so 86 % of my were followers, 13 % were non followers fifty seven forty two fifty three forty six See how that percentage breaks down differently the bottom one worked better to reach a broader audience, and the top one worked better to hit the people who are already here with me. And right, you already know this you want to be talking to all of those people at different points in your journey. 

08:48 So when we're talking about surfaces of Instagram, you can think about your Lincoln bio, your stories, your feed, your Reels lives, and your DMS and of course, we're going to focus on DMS, but we're going to really quickly talk talk about all of these oK, so your link in bio, even though this is about automating your leads with mini chat, you need to make sure your email sign up lives in your bio again, even if you're using another service to link, you want it living there so that way people who come to your profile and see what you have to offer, the ones who are deciding whether or not they're going to become followers see that and have a chance to convert right from that page. 

09:24 Your stories you could do a dedicated story series, highlight an opt in, talk about a freebie you share to your list, Mention special deals that are for your list like, hey people, I just sent you an email make sure you check it out because I'm not sharing that deal anywhere else. Sneak peek upcoming content like if you're creating something and you're sending it just to your email, newsletters show them your computer screen saying, hey, like this is coming up and you can just do a very simple link in your stories with just, you know, plain maybe one of those photos you already took that just links to the email opt in, easy on your feed, highlight an opt in over and over and over. 

10:00 Add value through your list you have a series, you have a mini course. Show those things off. And again, just like with stories, you can sneak peek that upcoming content or past content and just say, hey, you missed out on this last time. Don't miss out on us like new stuff reels again, highlight the opt in over and over and over again. Use trending audio, use talking head audio mix of you and the footage that you have of the product. When I say talking head, you're going to use a talking head to repurpose an email. 

10:29 So like if you send out an email that has a link to a something or a link to a freebie or a download in there, do the talking head just like you said in the email and just say, you know, perfect all right, then head to your inbox and get it. And if they don't have that, that's an opportunity for them to sign up. Just a few examples of different ways you can grow your list with those video footage pieces that I talked about. So the first one where it says looking for an engaging post and go lesson that does not have any video footage of this opt in. 

10:58 But it turned out so well and people still are opting it's like a three-year old reel that's living on a YouTube in different places like that. And it literally just is like, you know, I go like this and then I go like this and I say something about like, I don't know, download this freebie. Ok. Next one is footage of me and APNG like an overlaid image of one of the worksheets the third one over is some of that B roll of me showing them just pieces of paper. And the fourth one is me flipping through a resource but again, just so you can kind of see how these things might look on your reels and all of those are different ways to grow that email list in lives you can walk through or talk through how to use that email freebie. 

11:43 What problem does it solve where can they get it? Remember, the really nice thing about lives is that when you're looking at all those little bubbles that are across the top of your Instagram page, lives will ship to the beginning of the list. So if you have a ton of people who you follow who are creating stories, if you go live, you're going to get jumped to the top of that list. Ok, I promised that DMS were the focus of this and it might not feel that way, but I could not leave all these other things out because they are really, really important and they are all things that you can use when we get to mini chat and the demo in a second. 

12:17 So I wanted to make sure that I didn't leave that out. But when we're talking about the DMS, there are so many ways you can build those relationships right there. So of course, you can say, you know, comment if DM me if if you are already in a conversation, you can just bring up the thing that you have. So maybe you're talking to somebody who reached out and you know, asked you a question, like a conversation that you have often about a frequently asked question you know, actually I have a tutorial for you let me grab the link for you and that link happens to be an email opt in to the step by step tutorial magic. 

12:52 Ok, Then we can also get into many chats so what I wanted to show is just an actual step by step of setting up a very simple automation it does not have to be fancy it does not have to be time consuming. I highly, highly, highly recommend picking one email opt in that you are just going to lean into with your mini chat service and that's part of why I was talking about so many different photos and videos and all these sorts of things so your visuals are different, but you just have, you know, a few of these automations set up. So that way it's not crazy difficult for you to keep track of those automated keywords and all of that sort of stuff, which again, I'm just going to show you step by step so let's get right into that. 

13:33 So let's like a look inside money chat and I tried to kind of reset my account to give you as bare bones scratch from possible. When you click ready to go templates, you'll see that there are so many different templates you could use. I want to just get you going so let's click auto DM link from comments, and this is the thing where somebody comments a post, it will send you the link. So first you can choose any post or reel, or you can select all. We're going to just do one specific one and you can see it gives you your feed you just pick the one that you want i'm picking one that's got an email option attached to it just like before. 

14:06 Then you're going to say add a comment and this is what people are going to type in order to get the link make sure that that is a unique word they wouldn't just comment randomly and then you're going to send the message that they're going to get once they click go. So it'll pop up in their DMS. And I like to say, you know, thanks so much for commenting. I'll send you the link in there having the option to respond just to open up that dialogue. And then I say, hurry here's you know, of course, use your own voice use however you want to look and sound like. 

14:39 I personally like to add emojis that make me think of whatever the option is so that way when I open up the conversation, it's really easy for me visually to see what did they ask for, What did I send them? So that way when I'm continuing that conversation with them, I can say, oh, OK, they obviously asked for the spring cleaning slides, which are, you know, related to this freebie. And so I can just see, oh, there's a broom of scrub, whatever, you know, So whatever works for you that's just something that really helps me because I do have a ton of different opt INS and having that visual available is so helpful. 

15:14 And then you just, you know, put your button label i always say learn more or download here or click here 4 and then I do like to add those replies in the comments underneath and I try to make sure that there is a question so that way they can, you know, see, oh hey, I'm checking in on them did you get that DM and hopefully they go to their DMS, they see it and they either respond to me in the DM saying, Yep, got it, or they come back and they comment again. 

15:41 Both of those things help with the engagement and help strengthen our relationship. Not only, you know, like actual relationship, but also the relationship in the algorithm for Instagram, just so that they understand like yes, this is actually something that this person wants to see and hear more of and more from so do a couple of different ones they let you add more they do give you automated ones to just start off with if you wanted to do this very quickly. Again, I like to do a question and I would recommend that. 

16:08 So when you're all done, you're going to click save or publish and you can kind of see what is this going to look like, you know, check it out but if you're happy with it, just click publish and you are all good to go and that's your first mini chat automation yay. Ok, so how to incorporate all of this oh my goodness, that was so many different things and so many different options there's a couple of different ways you can think about it, right? Of course, we want to be consistent. I find it really helpful to plan ahead and batch. You could also just make like an opt in day, like OK, the seventh of every month I'm going to share my opt in. 

16:41 You could always do a story when your email list goes out so that way you're talking about, hey, newsletter friends, did you see blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pop a reminder in your calendar if you are a calendar person, I'm really not. But if you are, put a reminder on your calendar on whatever day of the month or, you know, multiple times a week. So that way you're not forgetting this. And also another option that I have found really helpful to kind of not be so overwhelmed is to consider one surface of Instagram each week of the month. So the first week of the month, you're always going to share in your stories the second week of the month you've got a feed post the third week of the month you're doing a real the fourth week you're going live to talk about whatever your email opt in is. 

17:24 So that's kind of a nice way to break it up and spread it out and not feel like, Oh my gosh, this is super overwhelming. If you have any questions about this at all, I'm so happy to help you. My Instagram handle is teach dot the dot teacher author over on Instagram. I also run the Instagram for teacher authors Facebook group, so you can jump on in there and connect, ask me any questions, all of that sort of stuff i'm so happy to help. Thanks again for watching i'll see you later bye.